Why Your Throat Hurts When you Cry
The body’s autonomic nervous response to stress
The dreaded frog in the throat is known as the Globus Sensation, and the pain you experience in times of anguish partially has its roots in evolutionary biology. Firstly, if the feeling that brings on tears is particularly intense it can be a scary and overwhelming experience.
And if so, when you begin crying, the fear of the emotion itself engages and innervates the sympathetic nervous system, otherwise known as the body’s Fight or Flight response.
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When in fight or flight, your throat (vocal tract) and vocal folds (the muscles that vibrate to create sound) expand and widen to allow more oxygen to fill your lungs to fuel a sudden escape or break into a fight. However, swallowing and talking pull the vocal folds back together and run into conflict with the other muscles trying to keep them apart! The increased effort to expand the throat and the tension created by opposing contractions when talking or swallowing trigger pain and discomfort in the throat.
Secondly, if you really don’t want to let out what you’re feeling, holding your breath keeps the emotion at bay; which is why crying tends to be sputtered with a lot of gasping for air. But when we hold our breath to prevent feeling too much this paradoxically closes the vocal folds and narrows the vocal tract!
Therefore, when dealing with intense feeling, the body is preparing to take in more oxygen, by opening the vocal folds, to deal with the threat (the fear of the emotion) and simultaneously working to stem the flow of feeling by closing the vocal folds (limiting the amount of oxygen to plug the feeling).
My own experience with the Globus Sensation
To illustrate that you are not alone, at my father's funeral, I was asked to say a few words. The sensation was so painful, I couldn’t bring my vocal folds together to make a sound. To this day, not being able to speak at my father's funeral troubles me greatly but it goes to show that the depth of the feeling is what you must come to get to grips with in order to allow the pain to pass. The reason why my feeling was particularly intense, is…
